Increasingly, business transactions are handled via telephone including customer complaint and customer support handling. Businesses have established call centers to handle incoming call traffic and to interact with customers. However, these call centers, staffed by live people, tend to be expensive and difficult to staff.
Paying for call centers is an expensive proposition relative to automated methods, such as websites for Internet traffic. In addition, businesses have found that it is difficult to effectively train and maintain staffing at call centers. It is expensive to train personnel for call centers and at the same time it is difficult to retain trained call center agents. High turnover rates coupled with expensive training leads to a high cost for call centers.
To counteract this cost, businesses have turned to interactive voice response systems to provide automated answers to customer questions and to selectively route calls based on a call subject to a set of agents trained on a narrower set of subjects. Such systems have been found to reduce call center volume and to reduce training expenses associated with training call center agents.
However, customers complain of lengthy menus and difficulty in navigating such menus. Often, a customer calling a call center must wait through a lengthy menu or a series of menus in order to determine which option best suits his or her needs. After waiting through several menus and submenus, customers sometimes become frustrated, leading to poor customer satisfaction and potentially lost sales. As such, there is a need for an improved announcement system and method of interacting with callers.